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LONDON—Smiling and giggling with glee, Victoria’s Richard Weinberger collected a bronze medal in 10-kilometre open-water swimming on Friday. He then proceeded to rhyme off a thank-you list that would have done an Oscar-winning actor proud.

He expressed his gratitude to his mom, his dad, his coach, his national squad teammates, the government-funded program that paid for him to attend a training camp in Australia. And he was just getting started.

At one point he also thanked his coach’s Lakeland terrier, Harlow, “even though she bites me every time I come over.”

Quipped Ron Jacks, the coach, to his 22-year-old pupil: “Teaches you how to deal with pain.”

Dealing with pain, of course, was among the central necessities to Weinberger’s successful circumnavigations of the Serpentine, the man-made lake in majestic Hyde Park, where 25 of the best long-distance swimmers in the world spent most of two hours determining who among them would mount an Olympic podium.

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Tunisia’s Oussama Mellouli won gold in a time of 1 hour, 49 minutes and 55 seconds. Germany’s Thomas Lurz, the silver medallist, finished three seconds back of the winner, while Weinberger crossed the line 5.2 seconds behind Mellouli.

For Weinberger, and for Canada’s swimming contingent at the Olympics, it was a major breakthrough. Open-water swimming was only added to the Olympic program in 2008, and this is the first year that Canada qualified a competitor.

On Thursday, Toronto’s Zsofi Balazs became the first Canadian woman to compete in the sport, when she finished 18th in the 10-kilometre women’s event over the same course.

Both the men’s and women’s races were fascinating spectacles played out amid the backdrop of Hyde Park’s manicured gardens and verdant tree canopies. The swimmers mostly raced in tight packs; drafting behind another competitor, as in road cycling, requires less energy than leading the group.

The event has been dubbed “the wrestling of swimming” by Toronto coach Linda Kiefer for good reason. With no lanes like those in pool swimming to separate competitors, physical contact is inevitable and potentially damaging. On Friday, Weinberger said the phalanx of thrashing arms and kicking feet made the race “extremely physical.”

“It was brutal,” he said. “Alex Meyer (the American who finished 10th) cut me off. It’s just part of the race. He didn’t mean it. But I got a feel for what was going on in the pack and I thought, ‘I do not want to be in here.’ ”

Such was Weinberger’s calculation in his Olympic debut: it’d be easier to swim at the front with no draft than to swim in the chaos with the benefit of one.

“It’s better to put energy into pushing the pace rather than fighting (other swimmers),” he said.

With that in mind, Weinberger swam to the front of the field from almost the beginning, leading the group through the first two of six laps. By the fifth lap, Weinberger sat third behind Mellouli and Lurz — precisely where he wanted to be — and the strategy served him well.

Weinberger said his weakness is all-out sprinting; given his relative youth, he doesn’t have the “old-man strength” required for a powerful finishing kick.

His skill, on the other hand, is pushing hard for long distances at what Jacks called “an intermediary pace.” That heightened pace prevented the superior sprinters — for instance, Spyridon Gianniotis, the Greek who finished fourth — from sticking with the lead group and outkicking Weinberger to the finish line.

On each of the six laps, the swimmers passed a so-called feeding pontoon, where coaches and team officials dangled bottles of energy drinks from long poles. The mixtures varied from swimmer to swimmer. Weinberger took a Gatorade-type concoction after his second lap.

After his fourth lap, he took a few gulps of what Jacks called a “turbo drink” — a highly caffeinated beverage laced with Aspirin to help dull the late-race aches. To quaff the fuel and not lose time, most of the competitors flipped over to the back stroke for a few quick beats before returning to their standard front crawl.

The London Games billed the only open-water swimming event — the 10-kilometre — as a “marathon.” But in the open-water swimming community, the 10-kilometre isn’t known by that name. The “marathon,” to open-water practitioners, is a 25-kilometre roll in the deep. There’s an annual event on Quebec’s Lac St. Jean that sets the finish line at 32 kilometres. This year’s winner of that event spent more than six hours in the water en route.

On Thursday, after considering the idea of tackling that task, Balazs said: “Right now I’m just happy I finished a 10K. I don’t know if I could finish (or) even think about a 25K at this point.”

Weinberger, for his part, said his long-term goal is to be the Olympic gold medallist in 2016 in Rio, which may not be a stretch. Mellouli, the gold medallist, said he plans to retire. The rest of the sport’s current elite is weighted heavily toward swimmers in their 30s — many of whom, Jacks speculated, may have competed in their last Olympics.

“(Weinberger) is the best in the world, I think,” Jacks said. “Well, he wasn’t (on Friday). But I think he has that ability.”

Racing, said Weinberger, makes him happy.

“Training’s hard, and this is like Christmas morning,” he said. “I just love racing.”

How hard is training? Weinberger said that in preparing for the Games — he took the second half of the year off from his studies at the University of Victoria to swim full-time — he was logging 80 to 100 kilometres a week. A typical workout included eight to 10 kilometres of swimming — 160 to 200 laps of an Olympic-sized pool. On many days, he completed two such slogs.

It’s a mentally trying regimen, and the coach-athlete relationship between Jacks and Weinberger seems complex. Weinberger joked that, by Wednesday of most weeks, he and Jacks would engage in “lovely conversations.” Jacks has called Weinberger’s journey to the Olympics a series of mental “breakdowns and repairs.” Jacks wasn’t complaining, mind you. He said the best athletes often come with hard-to-handle quirks.

Certainly open-water swimming has more than its share. Many of its top races are contested in oceans, which can provide a gruelling test. The bouncing of the waves can produce sea sickness; swimming through floating trails of vomit is an occupational hazard.

Other flotsam can be nauseating; swimmers tell of midrace brushes with used condoms, plastic shopping bags, unidentified poop. Aquatic life can be dangerous too; jelly fish are a bane. And sharks — well, there’s a reason why there’s an official with nail clippers inspecting competitors before races. Long nails lead to bloodied bodies, which, in certain locales around the globe, attract the wrong kind of attention.

The Serpentine, in contrast was a relatively inert setting, although Weinberger turned up his nose a little when he pointed out “we were kind of swimming in seaweed and duck crap.”

While Weinberger said swimming in lakes is a refreshing change from the drudgery of the pool, there are advantages to chlorinated sterility. Jacks said that Weinberger, as a matter of self-preservation, didn’t train in the Serpentine before Friday’s race.

“The bodies of water we swim in aren’t very clean,” Jacks acknowledged. “And if you’ve got that 48 hours of swallowed goose stuff in you, you can get sick.”

He said that after a recent race at the Sumidero Canyon in southern Mexico, “everybody (who swam in the race) got sick.”

On Friday, in the sunny glow of a gorgeous afternoon, Weinberger, a bronze medal around his neck, looked the picture of health.

“It is painful,” he said of the race. “But you try to hide it.”

At this point his coach interjected and offered a theory for his star swimmer’s invisible discomfort. Maybe it was the 100-kilometre training weeks that toughened him. And maybe it was Harlow nipping at his Achilles. But the coach, beaming with pride, had another outlook.

“The best remedy for pain is success,” said Jacks. “Takes it away totally.”

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